Grand Rounds is “the weekly summary of the best healthcare writing online”. I’ve hosted this medical blog carnival twice and considered it a great honor to do so.

I have submitted a lot of posts to the Grand Rounds. Often I even wrote a special blog post to fit the theme if there was one. Almost all my submissions have been accepted. I really enjoyed the compilations. There was a lot of outstanding creativity and originality in how the links to the blogs were “aggregated” and highlighted.

Usually I only read those posts that seemed the most interesting to me (the summary thus works as a filter). But through the Grand Rounds I read posts that I would never have read and I learned about bloggers I never heard of.

Why am I talking in the past tense? The Grand Round is still there, isn’t it?!

Yes, it is still there (luckily), but the organizers are thinking of a “rejuvenation of this old dinosaur”. As the previous host, Margaret Polaneczky explained

“… Grand Rounds has dropped a bit off all of our radars. Many, if not most of us have abandoned the old RSS feed to hang out on Twitter, where our online community has grown from a few dozen bloggers to feeds and followers in the hundreds and even thousands.”

One of the measures is that the Grand Rounds editions should be more concise and only include the “best posts”.

I too go for quality, and think one should carefully select contributors (and hosts), but is the 7-year-old dinosaur to be saved by chopping him in pieces? Should we only refer to 10 posts at the max and put the message in a tweet-format like Margaret did in an experiment?
I was glad that Margaret gave a good old fashioned long introduction in the Dinosaur’s style, for that was what I read, NOT the tweets. Sorry tweets are NOT a nice compilation. They are difficult to read.
It also isn’t a solution to tweet the individual links, because a lot of those individual tweets will be missed by most of the potential readers. It is not coherent either. The strength of the Grand Rounds is in the compilation, in the way the host makes the posts digestible. I would say: let the host present the posts in an attractive way and let the reader do the selection and digestion.

Also important: how many of us will write blog posts specially for the Grand Rounds if there is a chance of 2 in 3 that it will be rejected?

It is true that the Grand Rounds is less popular than a few years ago and it is harder to get hosts. But that may partly have to do with advertising. My first Grand Rounds got far more hits than the second one, mainly because we sent a notice to great blogs that linked to us, like Instapundit (853 hits alone) and there was an interview with the host announcing the Grand Rounds at MEDSCAPE. In this way the main intended audience (non-blogging lay people) were also reached. The second time my post was just found by a handful of people checking the edition plus this blog own readers.(I have to admit that this last Grand Rounds Edition might have been better if it had been more concise, but at least one person (Pranab of Scepticemia) spend 2 hours in reading almost all the posts of the round-up. So it wasn’t for nothing)

If some busy clinicians can be persuaded to host The Grand Rounds using a shorter format, that is fine. And it is good to be more concise and leave out what isn’t of high quality. But why make it a rule to include just 10 or 12? Even more important, don’t change blog posts for tweets. For I don’t think, as Margaret passed on, that the concept of the individual blog has been sometimes “overshadowed by Twitter and Facebook, whose continual unending stream demands our constant attention, lest we miss something important that someone said or re-said…” Even I have given up to constantly follow all streams, and I suppose the same is true for most clinicians, nurses etc. Lets not replace posts by tweets but lets use Twitter and Facebook to promote the Grand Rounds and augment its radius.

Grand Rounds is evolving as a more focused, curated publication. Rather than a 4,000 word chain-o-links, Nick Genes, Val Jones and others felt that a focused collection of recommendations would be more manageable for both readers and hosts. This is Grand Rounds for quality rather than link love.

It isn’t contacts, followers, friends, subscriptions, readers, link love, mentions, or people’s attention. It’s time. With time I can have all of these things.

“Link love” and “chain-o-links” undervalue what blog carnivals are about. Perhaps some bloggers just want to be linked to, but most want to be read, and that is the entire idea behind the blog carnival. I can’t imagine that the blog hosts aim to include as many links as possible. At the most it is lovefor particular posts not “link love” perse.

Changing the format to tweets (♬♫) will only increase the link/text ratio. Links will become more prominent.

I would rather go for the ♥♥-links*, because I ♥ to blog and I ♥ to read good stuff.

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* Note that ♥♥-links is not the same as link-♥

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Here is a short Twitter Discussion about the new approach. I fully agree with Ves Dimov viewpoint, especially the last tweet.